Cozel Foster of Eagle Pass sailed from Pearl Harbor to San Diego on the USS Texas 68 years ago. “It's great!” he said.

Cozel Foster of Eagle Pass sailed from Pearl Harbor to San Diego on the USS Texas 68 years ago. “It's great!” he said.

Photo: Johnny Hanson / Houston Chronicle

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The USS Texas, the only battleship to serve in both world wars, was decommissioned in 1948. It's docked in La Porte.

The USS Texas, the only battleship to serve in both world wars, was decommissioned in 1948. It's docked in La Porte.

Photo: Houston Chronicle File Photo

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Marine vet back on board battleship after 68 years

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Sixty-eight years had passed since Cozel Foster laid eyes on the USS Texas. As he was ushered aboard the vessel last week, the Marine veteran surveyed its sun-drenched decks and summed up his feelings in two simple words: “It's great!”

Now 88 and a celebrated retired Eagle Pass high school coach, Foster was little more than a youth when he joined a throng of other veterans — stranded in Hawaii at World War II's end — to ride the ship home to America. “It hasn't changed at all,” he said. “I'm the only one that's changed, and I'm just older.”

Foster, who had been “supply side” with the Marines' 3rd Division, is one of two passengers from that trip still living.

“It was really overcrowded,” he said of the voyage to California. “I was an excess passenger, not the ship's crew, down on a hammock below decks. ... But my best memories were of getting home.”

The trip was momentous for all concerned. For the USS Texas, the journey was the end of a career that started with its launching in 1912.

By 1948, the only dreadnought to serve in both world wars had been decommissioned and given to the state of Texas, which docked it at La Porte near the San Jacinto Monument.

For Foster, it was a new beginning. A former high school football star in his hometown of Phillips, he enrolled at what was then West Texas State University, excelling as a linebacker and running back for the Canyon college.

In 1955, he joined the faculty of Eagle Pass High School, where he led the border town's football team to a district championship.

Most of his career was spent in Eagle Pass, where he retired in 1993. He was inducted into the Texas High SchoolCoach Hall of Fame three years later.

On Tuesday, though, Foster's focus was on the ship, which he toured with an entourage of well-wishers and trailing media. Afterward, he offered a somber assessment: “It's in bad repair.”

Repair will consist of replacing portions of the vessel's deteriorated hull and support structures beneath the twin engines, each of which weighs more than 1,000 tons, and the aft tanks. Scott Stover, the agency's deputy infrastructure division director, said the repairs will use the balance of the $25 million in bond money that Texas voters approved for the project in 2007.

“A lot of ships need these types of repairs,” Stover said, noting that Taylor Marine in 2011 performed $2 million in repairs to the hull of the USS North Carolina, a WWII battleship docked as a museum at Wilmington, N.C.

The Texas tall ship Elissa returned to its Galveston berth this year after 1,900 square feet of steel was welded to its iron bottom as part of a $1.5 million fix. Replacement of the 1877 sailing ship's deck with 22,000 board-feet of Douglas fir will continue through the spring.

Last summer, the Texas developed a series of leaks that led to its temporary closure and cost the state more than $2 million to remedy.

Stover called the scope of the repairs planned for the Texas “unprecedented.” Without them, the engines of the dreadnought would be at risk of crashing through the vessel's bottom.

The ship last underwent extensive repairs in the late 1980s.

An initial proposal for the vessel's repair included its eventual exhibit in dry berth. Engineering studies, however, revealed that the cost of such an exhibition could reach as much as $75 million.

The Battleship Texas Foundation, which arranges tours and overnight stays aboard the vessel, is weighing the possibility of launching a campaign to raise that sum. A decision should be reached this summer, executive director Bruce Bramlett said.

In the interim, the group is trying to raise money by selling commemorative pistols modeled after those presented to the ship's crew before its 1912 launching.

Bramlett said 750 of the paired pistols have been sold at $1,699 apiece.